Addressing
Desire: Detachment or Disappointment
By Kelly Tobey
When approaching the topic of desire there are a
few different ways that people deal with it. Some people link desire and
attachment together. Given that our attachments to the outcomes that do
not manifest are one of the biggest sources of pain in our lives, if we
have attachment and desire linked, avoiding desire would seem like a way
to avoid pain.
I was one of those people who linked the two. I
some how got the idea from my own interpretation of some Buddhist
teachings I had come across. I saw desire as one of the things to
eliminate from my life if I wanted to be free of pain. So I practiced
transcending desire. I thought I had become quite good at it. I was
living moment to moment and had simplified my worldly belongs down to
the one set of clothes on my back and a handful of harmonicas. I had no
goals in my mind and was free and available for whatever events unfolded
as I hitchhiked from place to place.
It is true that I had eliminated a lot of desire
but as I look back I would have to say that I also eliminated a lot of
passion for life as well. I was so resistant to the possibility of
desiring things that I did not allow my self to get deeply excited about
anything. A flatness had developed in my life.
It was not until some time later that I started to
allow desires back into my life. Sure enough, at first it did lead to
pain because I would get attached to having my desires come to fruition
and of course sometimes they did not. At this time I changed my
approach: instead of trying to eliminate desire and passion for life to
avoid pain, I decided to start working with letting go of my attachments
to outcomes. This meant I could put out a floating preference for my
desires to come true but if they did not, I would move on to something
else. Unfortunately this approach did not always work. What I noticed
was that if something that I desired was closely aligned with a deep
sense of purpose in me, and it did not come to fruition, I would still
be disappointed.
My next step was an exploration of disappointment
and emotional “pain”. I had made a point of avoiding emotional pain
up to that point in my life. I started to realize that two things were
at play. One was that it seemed a common sense idea to avoid all pain if
possible. The second was influencing me at a more subconscious level; it
was a hidden belief that I did not have the capacity to handle emotional
pain.
What I did not realize until later was that my
efforts at detachment had never really eliminated emotional pain from my
life, instead I had just buried it below my conscious awareness. In fact
the behaviors I had incorporated to try to keep pain out of my life had
actually created more emotional pain for me, because I had removed my
freedom to be really excited and passionate about life’s
possibilities. That was going against my soul’s natural desires and
had backlogged a pile of grief around not giving myself the opportunity
to live life fully.
As I lived a detached lifestyle without passion, I
had been fooling myself into thinking that I was not a powerful enough
person to face and feel disappointment. In turn set myself up to settle
for whatever came along in life without even attempting to use the power
of my influence to try to manifest what I wanted. Because I was not
taking responsibility to consciously choose to help co-create the
direction of my life’s events, I had put myself in a place of weakness
where basically I was victim to whatever happened.
I now see that setting myself up to be a victim of
events also helped me to avoid taking responsibility for what was
happening in my life. As long as I saw it as life “doing me”, rather
than me influencing life through my conscious choices, I could pretend I
had no responsibility for the outcome of events. This self-imposed
victimhood came with the heavy cost of being very disempowering. To live
without passion and desire I had to pretend that I was not a powerful
being with the ability to co-manifest a wonderful life. Yet all the
pretending of powerlessness could not keep me away from the deep
unconscious knowing that it was a lie. In turn, an anger was building
about the self imposed victimhood that came with pretending to be
detached, when in reality I had underlying irritations and
disappointments about some things that were not going well. In order to
maintain my victim stance, any anger that slipped out would have to be
focused on someone, or some outside force that was supposedly keeping me
down.
For my next step I decided that instead of trying
to avoid emotional pain or trying to project it out on someone or
something else, I would start to learn how to face the pain and feel my
way through it. This has been one of the most difficult, yet most
rewarding, adventures in my life so far.
As I had no previous training with facing my
emotions it has took a lot of practice to get to my present point of
openness with my feelings. I am glad to report that I have a lot more
ease with facing and feeling my emotions, even the deep and dark ones.
Yes, I still resist them sometimes because of some uncovered fears that
have not been fully cleared, but overall, if I get a sense that
something is available to be faced and felt, I will invite it forward.
This is because time and time again I have been rewarded with more inner
freedom and a bigger sense of strength once I go through a feeling. No
longer do I have to take the strategy of avoiding my passion and desire.
This gives me the freedom to embrace more of life, which in turn deeply
enriches my experiences.
If I desire something and it does not go my way, I
know that I can handle any disappointment that arises. On the other
hand, if I do manifest what I desire, the experience is filled with joy
and passion.
I have found that the foundation for passion is
based in clear conscious choice. Nothing kills off passion like
victimhood. If I slip back into feeling life is “doing it to me”
passion will be non-existent.